Learning Day 5

I decided to retitle what I’m doing as just “Learning Day whatever”. While I’m focusing a lot of attention on Rails, I’m also doing other stuff, like working on my javascript skills and studying Perl.

What I learned yesterday: Yesterday I finished up Ch. 3 of Rails Tutorial and got a solid start on Ch.4, Rails Flavored Ruby. I also read the first chapter of Eloquent Javascript, as I’m trying to brush up on JS before I start a really exciting full stack opportunity.

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Rails is really cool! It helps that I’m working through a tutorial that showing me exactly what to do, but its easy to see that Rails is popular for a very good reason. I learned about testing in rails, which seems easier and more natural than the testing I was doing in Django (full disclosure: It’s entirely possible that I just never learned the ‘natural feeling’ way to test in Django.) Guard is also really cool! Continuous testing == win.

I also learned some baby step basics of Javascript. Eloquent Javascript is described more as an intro to programming through Javascript than an actual Javascript primer, so we’ll see what happens. I think it will definitely be enough to allow me to go into my new role with a decent foundational understanding. So far, Javascript hasn’t thrown anything too crazy into the mix, but its still early.

What I’m going to do today: My goal for today is to finish Rails Flavored Ruby and get a start on Ch. 5, “Filling in the Layout”. I’m also planning to read the second chapter of Eloquent Javascript.

What I expect to learn: I expect to learn more ways to incorporate legit Ruby code into your Rails application, as thus far its been mostly Rails specific commands.

I also expect to learn about Programming Structure in Javascript. We’ll see what that entails.